One of the most useful things I’ve learned about recovering from trauma is that my decisions need to be judged according to the incomplete information that was available to me at the time.
So, say I’m deciding whether to eat chicken at a restaurant. All evidence is that it’s a good idea. I’m hungry for chicken, and I usually feel good after eating it.
I eat the chicken, and I get food poisoning. The resulting illness causes me to fall short of responsibilities, and creates numerous problems for me and the people who depend on me.
What happened?
Trauma brain says: “This happened because I am Bad At Making Decisions. If I had made The Right Decision and not eaten chicken, everything would have been fine.”
Recovery brain says, “According to the information that was available to me, the chicken was unlikely to make me sick. Eating chicken was a Good Decision with Bad Consequences. This happened to me because I had incomplete information.”
The “trauma brain” response makes all decisions really hard, because each decision involves the prospect of being judged by a future self that has more information.
“Should I buy the $2 mouse pad or the $3 mouse pad? If I buy the cheaper one and it doesn’t work well, it will be my own fault for not buying a better quality one…”
(Then I might end up paying myself $1-per-hour to agonize over which mouse pad to buy, which is probably an ACTUAL unwise course of action.)
But if I foster the “recovery brain” response, I can start to trust that my future self will judge my decisions kindly.
“If I buy the cheap mouse pad and it doesn’t work, then I only gambled $2 on it. If I buy the $3 one and even it doesn’t work, then I’ll have more closely guessed how much I need to pay for a mousepad of sufficient quality.”
And then later when the mousepad doesn’t work: “Well, that didn’t work. At least I made a decision. The outcome has given me more information about the options available to me going forward.”
(Meta level: Decisions you made prior to reading this post about how to treat yourself were probably good given the information you had access to about trauma and recovery!)
tl;dr: Bad results are not always evidence of bad decisions. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt about why you do what you do.
your writing is a skill, not an inborn talent (unless, yeah, maybe it is). not everyone can do what you do and love
everyone says they want to write a book. everyone has what it takes to write a book. not everyone does it anyway. you be the small percentage of success you read about
your writing will always seem brickshit horrible because you wrote and read it a million times
you love this writing thingy. quitting it will be like cutting off your fingers one by one.
someone out there will want to read what you wrote.
someone out there wants to know what is on your mind.
someone out there appreciates your art. they will share it with their friends. they will share it with their loved ones. they will share it with their future self because maybe what you wrote saved them.
if you give up now, you know you will just come back to it again, whether it’s years from now, months, or next week. you love writing, that’s why you planted the seed of thought that you are going to write this book, and whether you come back to it or not, your unwritten stories will come back to you.
the older i get the more i can understand why people back in the old fairytale days would just fuck off and be a hermit in the woods. just chilling out in the middle of nowhere and occasionally telling random heroes cryptic shit. living the fucking dream.
just two days ago, i was thinking, “you know what i haven’t done in a while? write a story about some stupid and embarrassing thing i’ve done. i wonder if this is because i’m twenty-seven and no longer a bumbling idiot who can’t make it through her day without bringing shame on her family?”
haha! said the universe. this bitch really thinks!!!!!
so this morning i was riding the bus to work, because i’m a grown up, who has a job, and i must take not one but two busses to get there. and i get off the first bus feeling a lot of hope for not just the day but the whole week. last week was cloudy and overcast, but this week! this week is going to be different. it’s sunny. i’m going to be productive. i’m going to be focused. i’m going to get things done.
spoiler: i’m going to abandon all these plans immediately.
i reach into my pocket to retrieve my wallet, which has my transit pass in it, and realize: it’s not there. it is also not in my other pocket. it is also not in my gym bag.
it is still on the bus.
you know that feeling when you’ve lost something where like, just before you go to see if you lost it you already know that you lost it?
it’s like how neo slows down time to dodge bullets in the matrix except instead of being that, it’s me realizing i have already done something incredibly stupid.
the problem with my wallet still being on the bus is that i myself am not still on the bus, which means that with every second, my wallet is getting farther away from me. this is distressing for many reasons but primarily i’d say that i don’t like it when my money and i are parted. i don’t have a lot of money, but what i do have i like to keep a very close eye on, because i need it to live, you see. still, there are lots of other things in that wallet that i don’t want to be parted from:
my drivers’ license, which i don’t use to drive anymore but is a nice picture of me and is also the world’s most ANNOYING thing to replace,
my work credit card and ID to get into the building,
my ventra transit card,
a wine punchcard on which i am only THREE WINES away from a $1 bottle of wine, and
a little post-it with the combination to my gym lock, which i am too dumb to remember but which i desperately need if i ever want to retrieve my running shoes from my gym locker.
i mean … y’all know that the only thing to do is chase that bus down. i’m not gonna cross my fingers and hope my wallet makes it to the lost and found. i don’t have that kind of luck.
my outfit for today was very, “90s straight girl meets her boyfriend’s sister and IMMEDIATELY becomes a lesbian,” so i was wearing 5-inch heels that weren’t conducive to running, which means i did the only sensible thing there was to do and kicked them off so that i could chase the bus in my bareass feet down the streets of chicago.
was this “safe”????? no.
but was it liberating???? also no.
did my foot my foot bleed and did it probably contract the black plague????? FOLKS IT DID!!!
anyway, there i went, sprinting down the sidewalk in my yellow floral romper and white jacket, heels in my hand, gym bag swinging behind me like a cartoonish ball & chain, and of course, because of who i am as a person, i almost immediately took a bad step.
friends, to say that i fell is to miss what happened, which is that i took an eight-foot vertical leap and did not land on my feet.
you know those cartoons where a cat gets scared and it jumps so far into the sky it touches the moon?
you know those videos of people with those water jetpacks where they can’t control them and they go rocketing through walls like the kool-aid man?
you know when a basketball player does that thing where they’re gonna dunk but they just absolutely whiff and end up lying dazed on the basketball court while whole stadiums of people laugh at them?
“oh my god,” someone yelled, maybe from their car, maybe from the bus stop, maybe literally god himself.
i looked up, dazed. there was a crowd of at least five people around me, all of them helping me to my feet, gathering my things. one very kind and very brave man ran out into traffic to retrieve my travel coffee mug, which – shoutout to my hometown’s endodontics practice, spilled not one single drop.
“are you all right?” one of the good samaritans asked. “holy shit you were – you were airborne for so long.”
you know when your brain has been scrambled and you know there’s some way you need to be reacting but you can’t make your body react that way?
i was like: “i have to catch that bus.”
“there are other buses coming,” Coffee Savior said. “like – in just a couple minutes.”
“no, i need that one,” i said, for some reason not realizing that i ought to clarify that my wallet was on that bus. one of the women, very kindly and warmly, stepped in close to me and put her arm around my shoulders and said, “between us girls, your boob is out.”
i looked down. the strap of my jumpsuit had popped off my shoulder, and indeed, my boob was out. i zipped up my white (WHITE. IT WAS WHITE. WHY DID I WEAR WHITE TODAY? YOU NEVER WEAR WHITE AFTER LABOR DAY!!!) jacket to hide this problem, which feels like a problem for Later Molly to deal with.
i took my things back from them, put my heels in my hand, and inexplicably left them with a cry of, “thanks, i love you,” before sprinting off again.
“THANKS, I LOVE YOU,” Shouts Bloodied Area Woman To Crowd Of Strangers While Running Barefoot Through Urban Center
i thought i’d become A Runner in the past few years by some weird fluky accident, but it turns out that i’d done it specifically so that i could chase this bus through not one but TWO intersections, because just as i reached it both times the light turned green. but when you’re already bleeding for a cause, giving up just feels like a waste.
this is called the fallacy of sunk cost, and it’s a stupid things human do that we shouldn’t.
i know this but i chased a bus for three blocks anyway and that just goes to show that the human mind is an enigma.
eventually, while turning a corner, the bus driver noticed me. he slowed down, looking perturbed by how far my fortunes had fallen since the last time we saw each other – which was less than five minutes ago – when i was, a) not bleeding, and b) not yelling at him.
he opened the door.
“i left my wallet,” i explained.
he blinked at me, but before i could get on, a man from the back row came running up to the front, holding my wallet in his hand. “you left your wallet,” he said, as if this would be news to me.
“you left your wallet?” asked the bus driver, in a tone that indicated what he meant was, why are you bleeding??????????
i took my wallet very gratefully from the other passenger.
i said, “thanks. i love you,” and the doors of the bus closed.
Voting for Democrats is still voting for the ruling class
Her salary at Mylan was $12,744,397 last year. Her father’s wealth is estimated to be somewhere between $3.3 and $8 million.
The overwhelming majority of these people are not even in the upper middle class, let alone anywhere near what you or I are forced to contend with in terms of survival.
By all means, vote (I am an anarchist and have thus far never passed up the opportunity to vote in any election – I am simply too frightened of what will happen to people with fewer resources than I have if I don’t.) But do recognize the values of the people you’re voting for; recognize that most of them are so wealthy they would be utterly unable to live our lives. And then don’t let voting be the only way you engage with politics.
Meg's Mumbles 